Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (3 page)

It was plain that this was no boy but a young man, shirtless, face down and away from me, right arm tucked under him. The skin on his back was mottled lavender and looked thin as newspaper, as if his shoulder blades and spine would tear through if he were nudged. He had slid partway out from a hollow, the kind animals dig beneath boulders for their dens, and the snow holding him in there must have melted and let him out. He had on jeans and his feet were still buried. At first it looked like his left arm was hidden under the boulder, but as I got close I saw that there was no arm to hide. It, the shoulder, and much of the upper left side of his torso were gone, as if the arm had been ripped away. We were silent and still so long that the chickadees started singing again.

I’ve seen bodies—dry corpses crawling with flies in dusty streets, an old woman withered in her armchair, dead for weeks. To say they all seemed to belong where they were might not speak too well of me, or of the places I’ve been. This one didn’t belong where he lay.

I took careful steps, looking for signs of what might have brought this kid to that place. The only tracks I saw were on the trail we’d taken to get there. Looking back at Aub Dunigan, I came to myself, put my hand on my weapon, and told him to lay the shotgun down. He snapped the breach closed and set it stock-down against a tree trunk. Once he’d done so, he didn’t know what to do with his shaking hands. “This is none of me,” he said.

I got George on the walkie-talkie. He was pretty faint at that distance but I told him to find a spot where he could radio the county, or call.

“What the hell for?” George said.

“Found a body up here.”

“What?”

I gave him the code and said, “Raise the sheriff. We’ll be down the hill soon as we can.”

Kevin had joined us and stood staring at the corpse. Aub turned away and walked toward a nearby boulder. I told him stay where he was. He looked back at me and gestured to where he was headed, as if to explain. I said, “Jesus, Kevin, get him to stay put.”

“Aub,” Kevin said.

The old man seized a fallen branch and pulled; with it came a piece of cloth and another branch of the same size. He’d made a stretcher by tying a blanket between two tree limbs, must have brought the blanket up on a previous trip. Demonstrating it to me by pulling the blanket taut, he said, “Take him on down.”

For some reason this made me sad. “No, put that down. Just set it down. We’ll get him later.” I put Aub’s shotgun over my shoulder and we walked down to the house without speaking. It took a while.

This was too much for me and George alone. Seeing the body and putting my own tracks everywhere around it gave me an unreasonable feeling of involvement, even complicity. When we made the last turn on the trail down, and there was just a screen of trees between us and Aub’s house, which was now flanked by two county sheriff’s cars, George’s radio car, and an ambulance, it felt like we three were coming out to surrender. As if thinking the same thing, Aub broke our long silence: “He wasn’t my doing.”

Out we came, me and Kevin and a stooped old man wringing his hands. Out of the woods and into light so white you saw colors in it.

S
HERIFF NICHOLAS
Dally stood waiting by his car. He’s got fifteen years as sheriff of Holebrook County versus my couple serving Wild Thyme Township, and this has always made him seem not only wiser than me, but taller. When he speaks it carries the weight of pronouncement. Good qualities in a policeman. He’s a clean shaver but that morning he had a small cut on his chin, a tiny seam of red on a white field turning black. They say he plays the trombone but I can’t imagine it.

He touched the tip of his campaign hat, and without a word placed a gentle hand on Aub’s elbow, steering him toward a waiting county deputy, who led the old man into the farmhouse. Dally turned to Kevin Dunigan and said, “Would you keep Deputy Ellis company while Henry fills me in?”

Kevin ignored the request. “What’s going to happen to Aub?”

“I need to speak to Officer Farrell. I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around, though. We’ll need you.”

Kevin moved off toward my deputy’s car, rubbing the back of his neck.

Dally turned to me. “What’s it look like up there?”

“Young man, nobody I know, no shirt, stuffed under a boulder and missing an arm. No tracks other than Aub’s. We didn’t touch him but we’ll need to get up there soon if we’re going to beat the vultures.”

“Holy Christ. Coyotes make off with his arm, maybe? But how’d he get up there with no shirt.”

“No animal sign either. Strange.”

Dally shot a look at the house.

“Aub says he had nothing to do with it. I believe him. But the reason I’m here in the first place is he took a shot at Danny Stiobhard this morning.”

Dally raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, “Best someone stays with him.”

We stepped onto the porch, which was missing only a couple boards. After wiping his feet on a welcome mat made of old tires, Dally headed in. Kevin followed him, leaving my deputy George on the porch smoking a cigarette. I could feel a line of nervous sweat down my ribs. There wasn’t much to do but listen to the snow melt, and to think about the vultures up the hill, and worry. I was needed to lead the coroner and sheriff back to the body. My deputy was free.

“George,” I said, “got a job for you.” He sniffed. “Why don’t you bring Danny Stiobhard in for us?”

“Come on.”

“I’d try the clinic first. If the doc says you can’t have him, tell her I said it’s important.”

“What if he ain’t there anymore?”

“You know, find him.”

George trudged off to beat the bushes, grumbling.

Not ten minutes later a maroon extended-cab pickup joined the small fleet of vehicles in the dooryard. Wy Brophy stepped out of the driver’s side. The county coroner and medical examiner was long-limbed and tall, with frameless hexagonal spectacles and a camera dangling from his neck. He hitched a camouflage backpack over one shoulder and raised a hand in greeting. Brophy’s arrival coaxed the two EMTs from their ambulance—a tall overweight boy and a short plump blond girl, county EMTs with ALS training and good equipment. The boy had a large pack on and between the two of them they carried an orange spineboard. Their names were Julie and Damon. Sheriff Dally stepped out of the house, and soon I was leading the four of them back up the ridge, leaving the Dunigans with Deputy Ben Jackson.

The coroner walked like an old-timey explorer, addressing the ridge in long, confident strides. He never did slip, and still had breath to ask me questions, sheriff listening all the while.

“How long had the body been out here, did Aub say?”

“He didn’t.”

“And you saw it?”

“Saw it a little. Didn’t touch anything.”

“Good. How bad was he?”

“You know. Dead as a mackerel. And he’s missing an arm.”

“Jesus. No sign of the arm, I gather. Any footprints, anything?”

“Just saw Aub’s, and now mine and Kevin’s, to and from the farmhouse. Could have missed some, but I didn’t want to muddy the waters. Let’s slow down a minute.” The EMTs had taken a number of falls; connected as they were by the spineboard, if one of them slipped, the other couldn’t help but follow suit. They had wet patches on their knees and Damon was sucking wind.

While we waited for them to catch up, we heard a woodpecker knocking for his lunch. Brophy raised his camera and searched the surrounding trees, stopping on a big gray beech. With a click and whirr he took his shot, then turned to me. “Downy woodpecker.”

By the time we got back to the scene, a turkey vulture had removed one of the corpse’s eyes and eaten it. A red string trailed out of the socket. Taking his first glance, the fat EMT said, “Oh, dog,” half to himself, while the monstrous birds flapped up into a tree to wait us out. I could feel them watching.

The sun kissed the forest floor, turning snow into a fine white fog, waist-high. We all stood back while Brophy tied police tape in a rough circle about fifteen feet in diameter, winding it around a series of tree trunks to encircle the body. Then he pulled latex gloves on, removed his lens cap again, and took a bunch of pictures, saying nothing, pausing often in contemplation. Once he called for me and pointed to a series of footprints, asking, “Yours?” I said I thought so. I couldn’t help but glance back at the sheriff, and he was looking right back at me. Brophy stuck a blue pencil in the snow next to where my prints doubled back on themselves and moved on.

Eventually the coroner got around to the corpse itself, taking angle after angle of the body as it lay. “We’ve got to turn this guy over,” he said. “Nicholas, you want to come in here, please?”

The sheriff thought a second and said, “Henry, you go. Let’s not make any new footprints.”

Brophy looked around him. “Don’t worry about the footprints, that horse is out of the barn.”

One of the EMTs handed me a body bag and I ducked under the tape. The corpse was thawing and I caught a whiff of roadkill as I squatted next to Brophy, who passed me a pair of rubber gloves. Up close, you could see every one of the kid’s vertebrae and ribs.

“Okay,” said Brophy, “we don’t want to disturb any wounds. I’ll take him by the neck and abdomen, and you take his left leg, and we’ll ease him over onto the bag.” I spread the black bag out and zipped it open next to the body. “Okay? Carefully.”

His leg felt like wet deadfall. He was still frozen to the ground on the underside where the sun hadn’t reached, and he came up with a peeling noise and a flood of rot smell. I tried not to look into the mess where his arm and chest used to be, or his empty eye socket. We laid him on the bag and I took a few steps back into my own tracks.

Brophy photographed the body and the empty space where it had lain, at some length. Then he squatted, blue pencil in hand. With the eraser end, he pulled open the kid’s mouth and peered in. Then he turned to the torso. First he moved the pencil over the remaining half of the kid’s chest in an arc, then bent down to look into the frozen meat and bone. After moving his hands down the remaining arm, he stopped at the fingers and pried them up for a better look. It was then I saw that the fingertips were gone. He took a glance at the legs and feet.

“This kid’s been shot.”

This was news to me. Brophy looked about him, making angles from various positions in relation to where we stood. Then he put his face up right next to the boulder’s visible surface, moving across and down the horizontal layers of shale as if he were reading fine print. Circling out from where we had been squatting, Brophy scrutinized all the neighboring tree trunks in much the same way, pausing at an old antler scrape but ending by shaking his head.

He pulled off his gloves and let them drop. “Wish we had the rest of him,” he said. Producing a small tape recorder, he began to speak into it. “Evident powder burns on anterior chest and abdomen consistent with an intermediate-range gunshot wound. No visible spatter on any likely surfaces around the deceased. Left arm, shoulder, heart, and portion of left lung not present at scene. Marks on body and cuts to the ribs and clavicle suggest trauma by ax or similar sharp tool. Fingertips on right hand severed. Extensive dental damage, likely with a heavy, sharp tool. Left eye scavenged by a”—at this he looked up into the tree—“turkey vulture.” Brophy put the recorder in his pocket, lifted his camera, and took a snapshot of the black birds where they lurked in a nearby beech. “Let’s zip him up.”

On the walk back down the ridge, four of us each took a handle of the spineboard and didn’t drop it once. Julie pushed aside branches and guided us as needed.

As the EMTs and the coroner got the body in the ambulance, Sheriff Dally pulled me aside and kept a firm grip on my arm. “So he was shot,” he said.

“Guess he was.”

The sheriff looked over to the house. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

“Sheriff, I don’t think he has it in him. Something like this?”

“And this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“You see how he’s living.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell you what,” said Dally. “I’ve got to bring him in. I’ll have Jackson clean him up, keep him as long as I can. Maybe Wy turns up something in examination that rules him out. That seems simplest, and we’re doing what we know we have to do. Meantime, I talk to District Attorney Ross and a judge and get us a warrant to search. Yeah?”

“All right.”

“Explain to Kevin, would you? Don’t say too much, now.”

While we were talking, Kevin had emerged from the house. I supposed he was curious. Dally put a hand on his shoulder as he passed to get to the farmhouse, where through a warped pane of glass I could see Aub sitting at the table alone, with Deputy Jackson standing off to one side.

Kevin had half turned to follow the sheriff when I stopped him. “You know Aub’s got to go in.” At this Kevin opened his mouth to say something but I raised my hand. “We don’t think he has anything to do with . . . that up there. But with Danny Stiobhard getting winged this morning, the sheriff needs to get everything straight.”

“Jesus.”

“Look. He’ll eat well, get cleaned up, and they’ll figure all this out, and in the meantime you and Carly can look into care for him. Could be a good thing in the end.”

The ambulance pulled out of the yard slowly, lights rotating, with Wy Brophy following in his truck. A cloud of diesel smoke hovered in the air for a moment, and then the breeze carried it away into the white morning. Soon after, the farmhouse door slapped shut and out came Aub, pinned between Deputy Jackson and the sheriff, who held the old man by the upper arm. Aub yanked it free; the sheriff seized it again; Aub yanked it free once more. He wasn’t cuffed. As they approached Deputy Jackson’s patrol car, Aub said, “I won’t go. I won’t go,” sounding as if he could have been saying,
I don’t want to go
. Looking around in anguish, as if he’d never see the place again, he met my eyes with his, just for an instant, and disappeared into the back seat.

Dally turned to me. “Nobody in or out.”

“Nicholas, there are trails all across this ridge. Dunigan’s land must connect to six other plots, not to mention the plots those plots are connected to.”